[MD] Truth as a word of caution

[Steven Peterson]

Hi dmb,


> Steve:
> What sounds wrong to me is to say that X was true when I had good reason for believing it, but now X is false because I now have new information that gives me good reason to think it is false. It makes sense to me to say that X was false all along even though I was justified in believing it in the past.
>
> dmb says:
> It only sounds wrong when you believe that the truth exists independently. It only sounds wrong to a Platonist of some kind. It only sounds wrong if you deeply believe truth is distinct from appearances.

Steve:
Independently of what? Certainly truth is independent of some things
but not independent of _everything_. Truth is generally held as
independent from belief, for example, in that believing something
doesn't make it so. For example, the fact that so-and-so believes
Rorty is a relativist does not mean he is necessarily a relativist. I
suspect that you agree that truth is independent of belief in that
believing that X is red is not what causes X to be red.

I also think of truth as independent of justification in that what we
are justified in believing may not be true. You say that that makes me
some sort of a Platonist, but I don't see anything metaphysical about
that view. To take a concrete example, people were once justified in
believing that the world was flat. Now we know that they were wrong
and it is true that the world is roundish. But you seem to be saying
that it was true that the world was flat, but now it is true that the
world is round. At the same time, I don't think you also believe that
the shape of the word changed since the pre-Copernican days, so it
appears you have a contradiction. What seems appropriate to me is to
say that even though people may have been justified in believing that
the world is flat, it has nevertheless always been roundish. in that
sense justification is independent of truth.




> Steve said:
> ...I have always said that I think justification and truth ought to be kept distinct if only so that we can caution one another that what we are now justified in believing may turn out to be false. You could say in that case that the proposition changes from true to false when a justified belief is later found wanting if you want, but that sounds weird to me.
>
>
> dmb says:
> Huh? Aren't there better ways to warn each other that truths come and go? I think the pragmatic theory does that just fine without having to say that truth is something beyond or above the best ideas we have at present.


Steve:
I haven't put truth "out there" or "above and beyond" the best ideas
we have at present. I am just saying that the best ideas at present
may not be true. That is to say that there may be better ideas that we
will come to have in the future. Somehow that strikes you leading to
nihilism, but to me it is a hopeful notion. It means that the future
may be unimaginably better than the present.



dmb:
As I see it, you have just hereby confessed to a Platonic instinct.
It's the opposite of my reaction, actually. I always thought such
lofty notions of truth were crypto-theological bullshit and it has
always been hard for me to fathom how anyone, let alone a bunch of
extremely bright people over centuries, could have ever believed such
things. I distinctly remember scratching my head and asking, "what the
hell is an essence" and "what the heck is a Hegelian Absolute" and
"what the heck is a Platonic Form". The more I learned about these
things, the more I began to believe that my original hunch was right.
It's a bunch of quasi-religious, metaphysical nonsense. Whole
philosophies are centered around metaphysical entities and categories
that could possibly be kn
>  own. James and Pirsig come as quite a relief because they not only balk at that - as almost every contemporary philosopher does - but also because they have a remedy and replacement that does NOT devolve into nihilism or relativism or some kind of dogmatic faith. These guys dodge all the right bullets.


Steve:
I don't think I am saying anything Platonistic or even anything that
Pirsig would disagree with. I think Pirsig would find it ordinary to
say that the world was roundish even before it became possible to
justify that belief. Likewise, slavery has always been evil whether or
not people at various points in history have been able to ride their
belief in the goodness of slavery to successful action. These are not
metaphysical claims. My claim is simply that it is possible to learn
things about the past. Again, I see nothing Platonic about the
intuition that the morality of slavery and the roundness of the earth
are not dependent on what people have been able to justify about them
in the past any more than the present is all that maleable by what
people believe about it now.

As Rorty put it in Consequences of Pragmatism, "For the pragmatist,
the notion of “truth” as something “objective “ is just a confusion
between (I) Most of the world is as it is whatever we think about it
(that is, our beliefs have very limited causal efficacy) and (II)
There is something out there in addition to the world called “the
truth about the world” (what James sarcastically called “this tertium
quid intermediate between the facts per se, on the one hand, and all
knowledge of them, actual or potential, on the other”). The pragmatist
wholeheartedly assents to (I) – not as an article of metaphysical
faith but simply as a belief that we have never had any reason to
doubt – and cannot make sense of (II)."

You seem to be accusing me of doing (II) and therefore revealing
myself as a Platonist for thinking that the earth has always been
roundish. I think that there is good reason to think it has always
been roundish (about as uncontroversial a claim as I can imagine)
without having to believe that the truth about the world is a
something extra in addition to the world.

Best,
Steve